FreeBSD Support on Windows Server Hyper-V

With Windows Server our goal is to provide the best platform for cloud and you can see that in spades in Windows Server 2012. We’ve quietly engaging on this strategy for years. For example, Linux support on Hyper-V. Microsoft has been contributing GPL to the Linux kernel for years now and we’ve long supported Red Hat, SUSE, CentOS and the latest release of Ubuntu 12.04 (released with the last couple of weeks) even includes the Hyper-V drivers built in by default. Now, we’re taking this to the next level:

FreeBSD support on Hyper-V.

We’ve listened to our valued customers who have told us that they’ve been successful virtualizing Windows and Linux and now want to take a look at their pockets of FreeBSD Unix and want to consolidate them on Hyper-V and better manage them via System Center. So, today, we’re announcing that we are working with our partners NetApp and Citrix to develop and extend support for FreeBSD on Hyper-V. This means that we’re developing FreeBSD drivers to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. The drivers will be fully released early this summer, including the source code for the drivers under the BSD license, and will initially work with FreeBSD 8.2 and 8.3 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and eventually on Windows Server 2012.